Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
The Third World in the 1980s
Nevertheless, during the 1980s a growing critique of the term 'Third
World' began to emerge from the new right-wing development strat-
egists who argued that the Third World is merely the outcome of
Western guilt about colonialism, a guilt which is exploited by the devel-
oping countries through the politics of aid. In the eyes of the so-called
New Right, virtually all developing countries are tainted with socialism
and their groupings have invariably been anti-Western and therefore
anti-capitalist, a view which has effectively been taken to task by John
Toye (1987). Ironically, many Marxists also found it difficult to accept
the term Third World because they regarded the majority of its con-
stituent countries as underdeveloped capitalist states linked to
advanced capitalism. Thus, in their eyes there were only two worlds,
capitalist and Marxian socialist, with Marxian socialism subordinate to
capitalism. Unfortunately, there was little agreement among Marxists
as to what constituted the socialist Third World.
The notion of two worlds perhaps represented the most concerted chal-
lenge to the three-world viewpoint and, indeed, most of the semantic
alternatives that we currently use are structured around this dichotomy,
namely Rich and Poor, Developed and Underdeveloped (or less devel-
oped), North and South. And such perspectives led to the notion of dual-
ism. The North-South labelling, in particular, received an enormous
boost in popularity with the publication of the Report of the Independent
Commission on International Development Issues (1980), known as the
Brandt Report. As many critics have noted, the Brandt Report set out a
rather naive and impractical set of recommendations for overcoming the
problems of underdevelopment, relying as it did on the governments of
the South to pass on the recommended financial support from the gov-
ernments of the 'North' (Potter and Lloyd-Evans, 2009).
From a developmental perspective, one of the Brandt Report's major
defects was its simplistic subdivision of the world into two parts based
on an inadequate conceptualization of rich and poor. Some critics have
claimed that this amounted to spatial reductionism of the worst kind,
apparently undertaken specifically to divide the world into a wealthy,
developed top half and a poor, underdeveloped bottom half - North and
South, them and us - although the terms did no more than rename pre-
existing spatial concepts. However, the labels North and South do seem
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